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1 year ago • rating 0 0This translation from Italiano to English was done by Davide Contu

Hi Doha,

your question is quite wide-ranging, and the idea of what can be beneficial or not depends very much on the sensitivity of each one of us.

What I can do is trying offering you some ideas that I hope will help you make a personal impression.

One of the reasons why many girls (and an increasing number of boys) of your age decide to have an au pair experience abroad is that this can be valuable for their future careers.With this, I don't just refer to the obvious aspect of learning or perfecting a second (or, why not, third) language, but I also talk about the development of skills that are very much sought after by companies. To call things by their name, I'm talking about concepts such as cultural flexibility, adaptability and ability to enter a new environment, the capacity to abandon one's comfort zone or, in a word if you prefer, today's so acclaimed resilience.

To all of this, we can then add the development of soft skills, for example of relational nature, whether it is in the rapport with children, the family or in general with a surrounding environment that has cultural references sometimes very different from those that are familiar to us.And then again the ability to manage one's own time and that of the entrusted children in a fruitful way, the responsibility for their safety and the ability to carry out the daily duties (oddly enough, turns out that also in this case learning a new language comes remarkably handy: recent studies associate indeed being bilingual with a greater ability to refocus attention on different tasks, acquire new concepts and ignore distractions).

And this just if we limit our focus to skills that can be spent professionally.

From a human and recreational point of view, spending a period abroad can represent an irreplaceable source of experiences and memories that, for better or for worse, will accompany you for life (of course they may not necessarily be all idyllic after all their inherent value is in what they are: experiences).To this you can also add the opportunity to examine yourself, your life at home and in general your own country, from a privileged point of view, that of an expat: here too the results could surprise you.

In short, as you see, even if only to deal with the topic in general terms, there could be many ideas to reflect on and concepts to be elaborated, even of a certain importance.Instead, I prefer to stop here, also because experiences, above all those loaded with meaning such as the au pair, deserve to be lived in the first person, rather than in the accounts of others.